Today the name of the Cholamandal Artist Village is on the international circuit as a concept of an artists’ commune, set up by the visionary K.C.S. Paniker in the mid 60s. The Artist Village is situated on the East Coast Road, on the way to the historical site of Mamallapuram, about thirty kilometers from Chennai (former Madras). It has the distinction of being one of the few artists’ communes in the world to have survived successfully. The Artist Village nestles amidst the whispering Casuarina groves and within the vicinity of the gently lapping emerald blue waters of the Bay of Bengal. It was surrounded by an old and sparsely populated village – Injambakkam, which today has become a suburb of Chennai. The concept of rural colonies originated in the late 19th and early 20th century and was considered a remarkable and internationally significant phenomenon of artistic practice. The majority of these artists’ colonies were to be found in France, Germany and the Netherlands, but there were also sizeable communities in Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. These colonies were held together by loose bonds of friendship rather than by formal institutionalized structures. Today the notable thriving communes include the American settlement McDowell in New Hampshire, Worpsewede in Germany and Ein-Hod in Israel.
Cholamandal was a vision of K.C.S. Paniker where artists as a commune would live together to foster the spirit of artistic brotherhood and collective organization. Exchanges of creative ideas between the artists would be mutual and there would be inexplicable harmony as they worked on their creative projects. Paniker not only visualized the pragmatic aspect of providing the working space for the artists, but also was gifted with the intuition to recognize potential talent that he nurtured with an encouraging attitude, in his capacity as a teacher and administrator. The case of K. Ramanujam is an instance.
Cholamandal was envisaged, as a place instrumental in offering a creative alternative to many young talents that otherwise would have been lost in the banality of proletariat existence. It provided an anchor for the artists’ economic survival in the sale of handcrafted articles through the Artists’ Handicrafts Association founded in 1963, and simultaneously afforded a utopian existence for the free flow of imaginative spirit with their artistic productions.
The period of early 60s was a trying one for the Madras artists. Patrons were few and far between. A lack of contemporary art awareness was a glaring lacuna in Madras, its visibility and appreciation drowned by the overt emphasis on the performing arts. Unlike Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta where the presence of European émigré was largely responsible for promoting new ideas of the Indian artists, Madras on the other hand could offer no substantial support for the same. In such a milieu it was difficult for the creative artists with their exciting adventures in modern art, to find an appreciative patron.
Since within the School of Arts and Crafts the infrastructure for the teaching of crafts was already existent, Paniker introduced batik in the curriculum in the early 60s. It was not only batik, creatively realized and explored on saris, scarves and dress material, but also the same creative and experimental agenda was applied for the production of other crafts from leather, wooden and metal, ceramic ware and jewellery. The sale of these crafts at the school’s premises, marked small beginnings, and was expanded later. Soon, various government bodies showed interest and this commercial venture became a success.
The venture, premised on the making and selling of handicrafts, motivated Paniker to start, in 1963, the Artists’ Handicrafts Association. The association made its sales through Handicrafts Board, State Art Emporiums and V.T.I. [Victoria Technical Institute] that also helped process foreign orders. Having generated the monetary funds, Paniker wanted a residential work-center for the artists near the city, that would function on a cooperative basis. The idea of the village was formally established in February 1964, and two years later, six miles south of Madras, along the Corommondal coast, land was acquired, which made Paniker’s brainchild come into existence. This name -The Cholamandal Artist Village – given by Paniker, reinforced his ideology of being Indian in spirit by establishing a conscious link with the past heritage and continuity of tradition. In May 1966, a group of seven enthusiastic and adventurous artists: V. Viswanathan, K.R. Harie, Jayapa Pannikar, R.B. Bhaskaran, K. Ramanujam, S. Kanniappan, and K.M. Adimoolam moved to live and work in trying and hazardous conditions. The artists’ village had no approach road, only a cow track, and no neighbors for miles around. Since they were low on resources, the makeshift studios that they constructed perished in the heavy rains and raging cyclones every monsoon. In addition to their workplace, they also lost their paintings to the vagaries of nature. Today, forty years later, the youngest of the group, P. Gopinath recalls, “We decided to live on Rs 100 per month. We helped fishermen in the area to bring in the catch and they would give us free fish. We would go into the village on a cart to buy fresh vegetables.” Since 1966, when it began with 40 artists, only 23 artists now live in the village and continue to encourage art lovers to share the experience.
With the birth of this concept of an artists’ village, Paniker had set himself and the group of young Turks on the path of bold experimentation. The land was allotted to forty members. Says S.G. Vasudev, former Secretary of the Artists’ Handicrafts Association, “there is no ideology or art style to which an artist must conform. The two basic freedoms so vital to an artist – freedom of expression and freedom from the shackles of earning a livelihood – are provided here. This leaves the artist free to create as he wishes.” In this respect Cholamandal became a unique symbol of cooperative enterprise and community living. Paniker’s founding of the village was in opposition and defiance of western individualism and contemporary Indian obsession with modernist idioms.
The Artists’ Village was not only the locus of painterly and plastic creative activities, but also a place where the allied arts of dance, drama, theatre, music, poetry-readings and active discussions on art were regularly carried out. This nurturing space was an outdoor theatre named ‘Bharathi’ after the Tamil poet.
The village space served international visitors who came from many climes, and left behind a slice of their memorable sojourn. A Dutch artist built a potter’s wheel and an artist from New Zealand thoughtfully put together a badly needed kiln for the village. American printmakers, especially Paul Lingren, introduced a whole range of new techniques in an admirable display of community feeling. The West German Government donated the cost of a two-apartment guesthouse to the village. The symbiosis that occurred between the domestic and international fraternity soon brought Cholamandal Artists’ Village on the International map. Acceptance and recognition came from diverse quarters like the Venice Biennale, the Paris Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Commonwealth Art Festival in London.
The village thus served its purpose. As A.S. Raman described it, ‘village of the artist, for the artist by the artist’. This artists’ village by the sea – a swan song of Paniker – witnessed the highs and lows of contemporary living. Many artists commend Paniker’s initiative in this direction while others condemn it as highly communal and suffocating. It still remains a home to its Diaspora like Velu Viswanathan and Paramasivam who religiously visit the place, as they have built their homes here. The unique aspect of its foundation was that its survival rested on the concerted artists’ community effort without any aid from government bodies. Paniker, in the late 60s, vehemently, postulated this in an editorial of the leading daily, The Hindu.
Cholamandal also saw two women artists purchasing land with an avowed idea of marking their presence within a male dominant community: Anila Jacob [sculptor, who sold her land to a chain store and now lives in Kerela] and Arnawaz Driver who later married Vasudev. Commuting every day to the colony to work in the studio of Anila, explained Arnawaz, “I am looking forward to my own little piece of Cholamandal. At first, I was suspect, since being a mere female, I was expected to abandon art for marriage. But now that I’ve proved my serious interest in art, I have at last been accepted.” This move of the women artists daring to live among a patriarchal community marked a courageous attitude. Anila Jacob took to the difficult medium of sculpture and made her impression on the Madras art scene. Arnawaz was equally dynamic, in consciously employing the regional vocabulary, derived particularly from Kolam and the diverse iconic representations of the regional deities.
Cholamandal created an aura of intellectual exploration within the ‘illusory’ cohesive artist community, bound as they were by local culture, through a shared vision, higher purpose, ideology, and an aesthetic goal. Paniker remained a moving force but during his leadership discontents were also expressed and gradually many artists moved out. His death initiated fragmentation and differences of vision and objectives. Nevertheless, Cholamandal continued to grow and nurture the artistic community, attracting not only students of the local College of Arts and Crafts but also students from different parts of the country, as well as foreign visitors who come on short artistic sojourns. Today the place is alive and continues to grow as a novel phenomenon. The second generation of artists has also come up and the village continues to nurture them as in the case of Jacob Jebraj, but in the view of some, these artists have also become rather insulated from the outside world.
Cholamandal today has also developed into an important tourist site with the construction of the East Coast Road linking Chennai to Pondicherry. Work began in late 2005 on a Cultural Centre for a gallery space for Cholamandal’s artists and a museum space which will showcase a permanent collection of the Madras Movement from the 1950s to the present, with works donated by the artists. With completion expected by 2006-07, it also has on the anvil the proposal to establish two small commercial galleries of 600 and 400 sq.ft each for exhibitions by non-Cholamandal based artists.
For over three decades, Cholamandal has been regularly organizing exhibitions, and publicizing the artistic character of the village via books, websites, tourist brochures calendars and postcards. Since tourism has come to shape the twentieth century in more profound and far reaching ways, the Artist Village has changed from being a site primarily as a habitat and work center for artists to tourist destinations that combines art and commerce.
Note: This article is also partially based on interviews with artists namely S. Nandagopal, P. Gopinath, V. Viswanathan, K.V. Haridasan, K.M. Adimoolam, R.B. Bhaskaran, Anthony Doss between 2001 and 2002 in Chennai, Kanai Kunhiraman in Trivandrum and with S.G. Vasudev in Bangalore.
All photo credits to Artists’ Handicrafts Association, Cholamandal Artists’ Village.
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